Where the Personal and the Political meet, get drunk and have unprotected sex. (And never, EVER use Oxford commas!)

Monday, December 15, 2014

The Teenage Trap

A teenage boy of the 1950's is cruelly forced to dance with a broom as punishment for his communist beliefs.

In the 17 years since I technically ceased to be a teenager, I’ve been stuck
in a teenage trap of blaming my parents for my problems. I dwelt on the scars
of my formative years, holding my mom and dad ultimately responsible for all of
them. I thought those experiences were the reason I've failed as an adult.
Though they've had a profound effect on my personality, there are plenty of other
factors that explain my lack of professional and social success.

The problem was I couldn’t move on from adolescence. There was no fulfilling
adult life to drape over the pain of coming of age. The existence I’d scrabbled
together after college melted away over time, exposing the unresolved emotional
detritus of my childhood and teen years. I couldn’t take comfort in a
rewarding, well-paying job that gave me a sense of contributing to the Welfare
of Humanity. I couldn’t bask in the love of a significant other to get me
through the rough patches. And, perhaps most important, I could no longer rely
on a collection of supportive friends to ease my fears. I was thrown back on my
seminal resources, i.e. my parents.

Luckily for me, they had the patience and generosity to put up with my
adolescent sulking for the last 24 years. But I worry about the many members of
my generation who appear to be going through the same hardships as I whose
family or friends aren’t as supportive as mine. Like most Americans, they may blame
themselves for their failures. Even though I railed against Capitalism and the
pathetic state of American education, I considered myself too smart to fall
victim to the same obstacles that were holding my peers back. After all, I was
great at school, and isn’t that the best preparation for the adult world?

If anything, my success in school condemned me to corporate serfdom. I
learned the lessons of public education too well. I internalized obedience to
authority and ignored many creative impulses that would’ve cost me
academically. School drummed a lot of common sense out of me, especially the
instinct to question authority when its decisions don’t make sense. I let any
initiative I might have had wither on the vine, because, in school, it did me
more harm than good. Consciously or not, Academia wanted a drone to plug into
the Corporate Matrix, and that’s what I gave it.

A strong, well-informed support network might’ve saved me from this fate,
but I grew up in the suburbs in a pseudo-community. When I moved to Chicago
after college, I lacked the social skills to make friends of urban dwellers or
form relationships with neighbors (not that they seemed interested in getting
to know me). Once the friends I made in college and of post-college roommates drifted
away, I had only my family to depend on. If I had bad parents, I would’ve been
screwed, and I think that’s the situation a lot of people my age find
themselves in: estranged from family and friends, left to fight the predations
of Neo-Liberal Capitalism alone.

Nowadays, young adults are presented with a depressing choice. We can either
work for the Man or try to make ends meet some other way. Both choices have
insidious emotional consequences. Buying into the System can leave us feeling
like a hypocrite and a traitor to our own principles. In my experience, a
spiritual rot sets in that robs us of the comfort we seek. If we try to chart a
morally upright course, the stigma of poverty may sap our confidence and
self-respect. Economic dependence on our family, friends and/or the government undermines
our sense of agency, maturity and vitality. We may resent our parents even when
they're supportive, because we feel infantilized by their assistance.

But I would say that, even if we “sell out,” any success we enjoy comes
largely through our own ingenuity, resilience and other skills they don’t teach
in school. The economy has been working against most Americans since the late
1970’s when Jimmy Carter (followed by every succeeding president) introduced Neo-Liberal
reforms that continue to put greater power in the hands of Big Business. This
has led to the weakening of the social safety net and the triumph of the
philosophy that self-gratification is the only worthwhile, attainable goal of
Modern Life.

Following this blueprint due to economic necessity or social conditioning,
our parents raise us with the “help” of television and the internet. We’re
exposed to commercial messages that instill the belief that happiness can be
gained through the acquisition of material goods and creature comforts. We’re
measured by our performance in schools that suppress creativity and encourage
submission to authority. We’re told to go to college and grad school, further
delaying adulthood. Then we’re thrown out on our own in an increasingly cruel,
lonely world that has little use for our credentials, but will gladly exploit our
desperation to pay off the debt we’ve been saddled with. Stripped of
resourcefulness and vocational alternatives, we line up for the corporate meat
grinder.

To fend off despair, we angrily search for scapegoats. We blame ourselves,
our parents, God, the Universe, everything but what I consider the real
culprit: The Powers That Be, the nexus of corporate and government authority
that runs things in the USA and most of the world. Sure, we often blame them
for all the world’s ills, but how often do we believe that we have been personally thwarted by the Establishment?
How often do we think we didn’t get that job or that apartment because of the System? This is a tough pill to swallow
for a member of the middle class, for we have been raised to believe that the
System may not work for everyone, but it works for us. If this is no longer
true, then we must face the grim reality that we now have the same status as
the working class and the poor and are vulnerable to the same machinations of
the System that demean, dispossess and, sometimes, kill them. This may be why
the protests over police killings of blue-collar African-Americans have found
such broad support; many of us white-collar Euro-Americans feel like we could
be next.

Our society’s individualism discourages us from blaming the Power Elite. The
American cultural narrative of self-determination tells us that we are the
captains of our fate. Supposedly, our socioeconomic structure is designed to
free us, not imprison us. Ergo, our failures are a result of our own inadequacy.
Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary presented by the collusion of Big
Business and Big Brother (the government), we still cling to this belief. It’s
difficult for us to accept that we may be at the mercy of forces beyond our
control. It offends our distinctly American sense of autonomy. It can also be
extremely depressing, for what is the use of keeping up the good fight when
your fate has already been sealed?

The most viable paths out of this nightmare seem to be the individual ones,
the ones we take alone. The option many people in this situation think of is to
drop out of the mainstream society, which seems extremely risky and lonely. But
I suppose it's no more isolating than being surrounded by people who either
believe in an inhuman system or are resigned to its dominion. Social
atomization has discouraged us from joining or starting a grassroots movement
to change things. We’ve been taught to believe that such efforts are more
trouble than they’re worth and ultimately futile. (I realize these claims aren’t
consistent, but anyone expecting consistency in propaganda is sure to be
disappointed.) Thus the System keeps us detached and (mostly) obedient.

Growing up middle-class in the suburbs may seem like a charmed life, but it
has left me high and dry as an adult. As Late Capitalism feasts on what’s left
of the New Deal and the Great Society, the skills and habits cultivated by our
upbringing and schooling actually make it harder for us to stake a claim in the
New Normal. The country we’ve inherited falls far short of the one we were
promised. It’s a land where all but the very wealthy are subjected to an
experiment in Social Darwinism.

The good news is we can fight back, but we have to overcome our
socially-conditioned tendencies toward radical individualism and materialism. Corporate
America would like us to remain forlorn teenagers for the rest of our lives. It
prefers us as slaves to our “throbbing biological urges” and passions, looking
for a quick fix of consumption to soothe our anxieties when the System denies
our efforts toward liberation. But we can reject this programming and become
real adults, that is, people who recognize their responsibilities to themselves
and each other. Through such a revelation, we can rebuild community and
collaborate on projects that develop the human spirit and overcome the
mechanization and commodification of human life.